Angelology

Sister Evangeline was just a girl when her father entrusted her to the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in upstate New York. Now twenty-three‚ her discovery of a 1943 letter from philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller to the late Mother Superior of Saint Rose Convent plunges Evangeline into a secret history that stretches back a thousand years: an ancient conflict between the Society of Angelologists and the monstrously beautiful descendants of angels and humans‚ the Nephilim.

From The very beginning the story to the very end you will be held to the end of your seat, a real page turner once I started I could not put it down. This book is going to be big, and it’s going to be popular, and it absolutely deserves to be both of these things. You should buy it, and read it, and let it scare you stupid.

The plot and pacing have a distinctly cinematic feel. Author Danielle Trussoni’s smart and polished prose, creates a very visual and emotional narrative. True development of characters and environment.

I am looking forward to reading the next book in the series. Hat’s off to Danielle Trussoni! ( )

This was an incredibly stupid book. Seriously. The prose was overwrought and none of the characters spoke like real people. Plus, it was about angels, which is inherently lame--and I have willingly embraced other lame literary trends like vampires, werewolves, faeries, shadowhunters, etc. This was really terrible, though, and I can't believe the New York Times gave it such a positive review. WTF?
I have more to say, but I must collect my thoughts first.... ( )

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni is set in the last weeks of the Twentieth century and in the years up to and during World War Two. A war between the angels and the nephilim is brewing and humanity will be screwed in the process. In the tradition of the religious horror of the 1960s and 1970s, the heros here are religious scholars (angelologists) and nuns. In it's set up, it's most like The Sentinel by Jeffrey Konvitz — except it's about three times as long.

A mysterious and uninvited visitor to a convent in upstate New York, leads Sr. Evangeline onto the discovery of a life time. But she might be too late to save the world. But of course she patiently listens to the elderly Sr. Celestine's long and rambling tales of her life and research in France on the eve of World War Two.

For the reviews that compare Angelology to the Da Vinci Code, I disagree. Although both share Catholic mysticism, they are very different in their narrative structures. Dan Brown's books are basically capers with the good guys either racing to the next clue before the bad guys, or running away from the bad guys. It's charming and silly and there's no real expectation to take any of it very seriously. Angelology is the exact opposite except that it's just as full of plot holes as Brown's books but it takes itself so deadly seriously that there's no fun to be had.

Rather than leaving the plot to a young nun with a closetful of skeletons, what the world needs is the brothers Winchester and their porn watching, booze swigging, on-again off-again angel, Castiel. ( )

Angelology begins in Milton, NY at St. Rose Convent. Sister Evangeline is 23; she has been living there since she was 12, and took her vows at age 18. She works in the library, handling the correspondence. Her days have been fairly routine until now, but on the day the book opens, December 23, 1999, she receives a letter from a V.A. Verlaine, inquiring about a possible connection between a prior abbess of the convent and Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller, the famous (real-life) philanthropist of the arts.

We quickly get enmeshed in a Dan Brown-sort of thriller, featuring theological mysteries that are derived from angelology, the study of angels and their presence on earth throughout history. We are reminded that the presence on earth of “Nephilim,” or half-angels, half-humans, was described at the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis 6:

"The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose,” and when “they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”

As the story progresses we learn how the history of the Nephilim became interwoven with the myth of Orpheus, among other myths; all of these stories are purported in the book to have had a basis in fact. As one of the angelologists explains in a clever implied repost to positivists:

"Whereas angels were once the epitome of beauty and goodness, now, in our time, they are irrelevant. Materialism and science have banished them to nonexistence, a sphere as indeterminate as purgatory. It used to be that humanity believed in angels implicitly, intuitively, not with our minds but with our very souls. Now we need proof. We need material, scientific data that will verify without a doubt their reality. Yet what a crisis would occur if the proof existed! What would happen, do you suppose, if the material existence of angels could be verified?”

Since the publishers tell you on the blurbs and by virtue of the cover picture itself that the Nephilim exist, it won’t be spoilery to reveal that Evangeline and Vervaine get involved in a life-or-death struggle with these creatures, who are not interested in having their secrets uncovered. In fact, it is the Nephilim, so the angelologists contend, who promulgated atheism, so that people will not suspect the extent to which humans are not, in fact, free of the nefarious intervention of Nephilim into their affairs.

This trope works well enough for most of the book, since there is enough similarity to the real world to make the story seem clever and entertaining. Toward the end though, a few sharks get jumped, in part, one supposes, to spur the reader on to read the next installment.

Discussion: It was interesting to see how Trussoni based the plot on an extremely literal and anthropomorphic interpretation of the Bible. Of course, there are probably more competing interpretations of the Bible than there are actual people in the world. Nevertheless, when you opt for the Vengeful God and Evil Angels version of the Bible, it seems to me that you need to have your characters also account for divergence from metaphysical doctrines such as omnipotence (clearly not a Divine attribute in this series), forgiveness, redemption, and maybe the whole Sermon on the Mount. (Jesus and associated ethics of love and morality generally do not play a role in these two books. The author supplements mostly Old Testament passages with some from the Apocrypha and other non-canonical works, such as the Book of Enoch.)

I do think Trussoni does a nice job with the theological arguments she does tackle, and the thriller aspect of the book is well-done. ( )

To quote Nero Wolf: Piffle. Don't waste your time on this melodramatic, cliched fantasy thriller. ( )